Ben Jonson

A Life

Ian Donaldson

An accessible and generously illustrated biography of one of the great writers of the early modern period, whose eventful life hasn't been previously chartered in close detail

Provides the fullest picture of Jonson's personal, political, spiritual, and intellectual interests and engagements to date

Includes discussion of some newly discovered work by Ben Jonson--a complete civic entertainment, and parts of another, along with a newly identified poem--and of a recently discovered journal by a young man who walked with Jonson to Scotland in 1618

Ben Jonson

A Life

Ian Donaldson

Description

Ben Jonson was the greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries. His fame rests not only on the numerous plays he had written, but on his achievements over three decades as principal masque-writer to the early Stuart court, where he had worked in creative, if at times stormy, collaboration with Inigo Jones. One of the most accomplished poets of the age, he was--in fact if not in title--the first Poet Laureate in England.

Ian Donaldson's new biography draws on freshly discovered writings by and about Ben Jonson, and locates his work within the social and intellectual contexts of his time. Donaldson depicts a life full of drama. Jonson's early satirical play, The Isle of Dogs, landed him in prison, and brought all theatrical activity in London to a
temporary--and very nearly permanent--standstill. He was "almost at the gallows" for killing a fellow actor after a quarrel, and converted to Catholicism while awaiting execution. He supped with the Gunpowder conspirators on the eve of their planned coup at Westminster. After satirizing the Scots in Eastward Ho! he was imprisoned again, and throughout his career was repeatedly interrogated about plays and poems thought to contain seditious or slanderous material. Throughout this lively biography, Donaldson provides the fullest picture available of Jonson's personal, political, spiritual, and intellectual interests, and he insightfully discusses all of Jonson's major poetry and drama, plus some newly discovered works.

Jonson emerges from this study as a more complex and volatile
character than previously depicted, and as a writer whose work strikingly foresees the modern age.

Ben Jonson

A Life

Ian Donaldson

Author Information

Ian Donaldson is Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He has written many books on Jonson and is a General Editor, with David Bevington and Martin Butler, of the forthcoming seven-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. An eminent scholar, Donaldson is a Fellow of the British Academy and past president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Ben Jonson

A Life

Ian Donaldson

Reviews and Awards

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title

"A deeply researched but happily readable new biography of Jonson" --The New York Times Book Review

"A fascinating portrait... Brilliant biography." --Daily Telegraph

"An authoritative and lucid biography." --Sunday Telegraph

"Definitive biography of this quarrelsome playwright." --Sunday Times

"The biographical material on Jonson is extraordinarily rich... Donaldson's fine book is stocked with new material." --The Guardian

"A work of clarity and lucidity, exact in its historical detail, full of new material and ingeniously suggestive in its conjecture and interpretation." --Sam Leith, Spectator

"An absorbing biography" --New Statesman

"This is a measured, comprehensive book written with style, sympathy for his subject, and scholarly balance. Other good Jonson bios are out there...but for sheer reach, grasp, and panache, there may never be a better one than this." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Donaldson's biography is well-paced, readable, and authoritative." --lThe New Criterion

"His deep involvement with Jonson scholarship and criticism ... is apparent on every page of his authoritative, elegantly written, and illuminatingly illustrated biography." --Stanley Wells, The New York Review of Books

"Provides an incisive summary of contemporary research on Jonson's life and works." --Renaissance Quarterly

"Wherever he may be in his after-life, Ben Jonson must be purring with delight at this latest, most magisterial biography of his. Than this Life, nothing more detailed, more elaborate, more painstakingly researched can be conceived. Through all the recorded details, many of them left to posterity by the subject himself, the author has so well succeeded - as no author of Shakespeare's life has ever succeeded - in entering into the mind of his poet, in agreeing with him at almost every point, even (it might seem) in sharing with him what he calls 'his spiritual shuttling between the English and the Roman religions' (p. 57), as to form almost one entity." --The Heythrop Journal